Beauty and Collaboration Through Technology

A friend just sent me a very lovely thing the other day. It’s a ‘virtual choir’ performance of Water Night, a piece of music composed and conducted by Eric Whitacre.

What’s a virtual choir, you might ask? In this case, it’s over 3,000 people from all over the world, each recording his or her part of the piece individually. Then the individual voices are edited all together to form a musical whole. Whitacre sent out an instructional video beforehand, first offering performance information (insights and direction about tempo, expression, style, diction, etc.), then conducting the piece for each singer to use as a guide in recording his or her part.

It’s an amazing accomplishment overall, and there are many wonderful individual stories contained in the creation of it, as well. A women whose village in Africa didn’t have internet spent two days downloading Whitacre’s conducting onto her cell phone. A man whose eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer see a regular conductor was able to sit close to the screen and blow up Whitacre’s image enough to follow his conducting. A woman who sat in hospice holding her mother’s hand while she recorded her part.

And the result is spine-tingling gorgeous, both aurally and visually. In the video, the thumbnails of the thousands of singers build into a wall of faces before Whitacre as he conducts and as the haunting harmonies develop.

How marvelous that we can use technology not only to do things faster, better, cheaper – but to create new kinds of beauty, as well.